Apple tablet

AnotherJake Wrote:Along that thread of thought, there are going to be a lot of great board games coming out for iPad. ...

My thoughts exactly. I see it becoming a device sitting on the coffee table that the whole family uses to browse the web etc. That they could pick it up and start or continue a saved game of Scrabble or Monoply at ease would be very appealing and nicely social too.

I was a little surprised that they didn't announced some sort of multitasking improvements but not really disappointed. Other companies and users make a big deal over the lack of multitasking but in reality it's not a huge problem on these devices.

As long as apps save/restore their state and launch fast you've taken care of 90% of what desktop users call "multitasking". People usually just have a lot of crap open at once, it's not all actually working simultaneously. You're not going to be compiling code, uploading a website, or rendering frames in the background on these things. You can already play music and get notifications (for email/messaging) while running other apps so that takes care of most legitimate multitasking.

The only areas I can think of where multitasking should be improved is streaming web audio, and maybe some sort of widget system. I'd say these should be iPad only, but having a way to bring up a little floating calculator widget or sticky notes directly on top of apps like iWork would be genuinely useful.

I dunno. They did a similar gimmick in Metroid for the Wii. You grab with the nunchuck, twist then pull back. It was fun and gimmicky, but doing the same on a touch screen looks sort of lame in comparison.

The larger screen size would make it possible to do two player games like those old table shaped arcade games. I've seen a couple iPhone games do that, Air Hockey for instance, and they are pretty fun.

Frank C. Wrote:The only areas I can think of where multitasking should be improved is streaming web audio, and maybe some sort of widget system. I'd say these should be iPad only, but having a way to bring up a little floating calculator widget or sticky notes directly on top of apps like iWork would be genuinely useful.

or writing a paper, easily switching back and forth between the reference and the word processor, or browsing the web while chatting, or watching a video in the corner of the screen while doing X, or ...

These are all things that I would do if I was "allowed" to on a device that I paid for. This is why my iTouch is a music player while in the car, and a game development console the rest of the time. It's too frustrating to actually use it to do anything, and most of that frustration is due to arbitrary limitations by Apple.

Can you honestly imagine how wildly unpopular the Mac would have been if you had to have Apple bless every application written for it? I can understand how that was put up with for a cell phone. On the other hand, you wouldn't want to confuse the user with a second program that sends Email when there is farting to be done...

Skorche Wrote:or writing a paper, easily switching back and forth between the reference and the word processor, or browsing the web while chatting, or watching a video in the corner of the screen while doing X, or ...

AnotherJake Wrote:One thing I can say is that it looks like my MacBook doesn't have enough horsepower to run the iPad sim at full speed. Just guessing of course, but I'm assuming it's all software rendered, and that sim display is rather large! Buying an iPad would be cheaper than buying a faster computer to run the sim on

I have a Mac Pro, and if I were you, I wouldn't bother buying a faster computer for that purpose. This is NDA level stuff, so all hypothetical of course